Henrietta’s Version: Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

On 19 November 1845, Henrietta Halliwell-Phillipps started to transcribe a manuscript of an early modern play, noting in her diary: ‘I began to copy another MS. Play sent him [ie her husband, James Orchard Halliwell] by Mr Larking called “Love’s Victorie” found among Sir T. Dering’s MSS’ (240).¹ Henrietta was a highly skilled copyist, trained by her father, the obsessive early nineteenth-century book collector Sir Thomas Phillipps.² Henrietta’s is a rather romantic story, especially if you have the sensibility of a bibliophile. Her irascible, eccentric father had amassed a remarkable collection of books and manuscripts when, in 1842, he entertained James Orchard Halliwell, who had first written to him as a precocious Cambridge undergraduate.³ Halliwell and Phillipps’s eldest daughter Henrietta fell in love, and subsequently eloped after Phillipps’s anger was roused over the issue of Henrietta’s dowry. Phillipps’s fury continued unabated after Henrietta and James married, and he directed a great deal of it against Halliwell, who had most probably engaged in some slightly shady practices in relation to the theft of certain Cambridge manuscripts. Phillipps constantly tried to ruin Halliwell’s budding career as a professional man of letters, and he cut off virtually all contact with his daughter until his death in 1889. (In something of a nose-thumbing gesture, albeit scarcely a brave one, upon Phillipps’s death, James and Henrietta changed their last name to Halliwell-Phillipps.)